Monday, 6 August 2012

The Rewarding Nature Of Doing Nowt!

When I
last posted on here, on August 1, I had just returned to exercise (on the bike)
having been frustratingly kept resting by a niggle. Probably an overworked
stomach muscle, a muscle that had eluded my attention for the previous 36
years. Having cycled without pain on Yorkshire Day, I
apprehensively put on my running shoes on August 2. I was worried I’d feel that
same muscle, either because there genuinely was something wrong with it or
because of a psychosomatic
reaction. I do believe that problems often are in the head rather than the
body, but that awareness didn’t mean I felt immune to its effects. So I walked
out of the door aiming for my first 10km in eight days wondering how my stomach
would react and how, for that matter, my legs would cope…

…because, let me tell you, I wasn’t looking forward
to running last Thursday. I’d had a long day in the office, I was heading out
to the pub around 9pm… I had to push myself a little to fit in a run. Not
through shortage of time, simply through loss of rhythm. Something that I have
been aware of ever since I embarked on this running malarkey: the fear that
I’ll do fine whilst I keep going, but that inertia will also kick in when I’ve
been resting. Inertia, in itself, has no negative connotations. Inertia means
retaining a “state of rest or its velocity along a straight line so long as it is
not acted upon by an external force”. So, when you’ve
got rhythm, inertia means you will retain it, like a disc thrown on the ice
where it encounters little or no resistance. But once that disc has lost its
velocity, something’s going to have to make it budge again, because it won’t generate
energy by itself… As it happens, I got my backside out of the door and embarked
on that 10k. With no real expectation of picking up where I’d left off in
terms of timing, but relieved that the process was back on.

Well, what happened? Simple: I ran 11.42k
in 1h07’13”, breaking the 6’/km barrier for the first time (5k aside) and quite
comfortably so at 5’53”. To put things into perspective, my previous best pace on
a run longer than 10k had been 6’25”. By not running for a week, rather than
running four times a week, I had shaved 32”/km off my best time. Nothing for
you to celebrate or analyse, but something I was happy with!

Some of you might be wondering what that all means,
whilst others will wonder why I’m surprised, given that all the experts warn you
against ‘overtraining’. What it means is simple: resting was good, it allowed
me to come back at a pace which makes a sub-hour 10k realistic; it meant my
legs did as I told them more than they previously had. As I train for September
23, I’m intentionally running an 11.4k route instead of finding a 10k option
because it makes it more likely that there’ll be something left in the tank
when I approach the final stages of the TenTenTen. Turns out
resting has a larger role to play in this quest than I had figured… although I’m
not annoyed about running as frequently as I have done up to now. I had plenty
of kilos to shed and I’ve done so – kilos I didn’t want to be carting around
with me on the hills of Portishead. Now that I’ve done that bit, I can focus
more on timings. In fact, at this rate, I might even start wearing my stopwatch
again!

All that said, I did attempt a 5k at lunchtime the following day. Well, it
turned out to be a 5k, anyway: I set off for ten, only sixteen hours after Thursday’s
effort. I realised early doors that the legs weren’t anywhere near as fresh: they were
again stepping down a gear uphill, asking me to put more effort into the run,
whereas less than a day earlier the stride had been more natural, my rested
legs more responsive. Whereas previously I might have ground out ten
kilometres, on Friday I was happy to cut proceedings short. Suddenly the bigger
picture was clearer to my untrained eyes and an early finish did not feel like
failure.

That was Friday afternoon. I was home alone with the kids over the weekend
while Mrs S visited a friend across the Bristol Channel in Wales, looking
forward to my Sunday evening long run. ‘Long’ for me, anyway: 15k or so. When I
set off last night, I felt good, the way I’d felt good on Thursday. So much so,
in fact, that mid-run I decided to tweak the route: instead of an even
combination of four laps of the flat section from a nearby roundabout to the
school and back and of four circuits of the downhill/uphill section on the
other side of the roundabout, I replaced two of the flat sections with an
additional ‘hilly lap’. After all, “hills are your friends”, Simon W had told
me on Twitter. Now I don’t know Simon W beyond his @mazymixer account, but he tweets
about running (amongst other things) so I keep an eye out for comments that may
inspire me. Besides, his Twitter page does say “feel free to chat”, so I (sometimes) do. Ditto with Martin Brown,
only I know a bit more about him thanks to the great
article he contributed to the “Yorkshire Post” last May. You don’t need to
care about running to be touched by it: but if you do run, if you are in need
of an extra shot of energy when running up those friendly hills, Martin’s
article is a good one to carry in your mind and in your heart. Last but not
least, the fourth member of this Twitter exchange was Nick Marriott, the Twitterblade to
whom I turn whenever I have a specific running question. Nick’s my personal
running guru. He got a mention
on here as far back as May and it’s his blinking fault I have become as
friendly with hills as I have…

I kept that Twitter exchange in my mind as I ran 15.59k in 1h37’11”,
a pace of 6’14”/km – five seconds per kilometre better than my previous 15k’er,
and that was flatter. Back in May I also wrote
about the “instantaneous connection between people who have never met before
yet who share such vast common ground that even some of the closest friendships
cannot boast”. Now, I wouldn’t want to burden Simon, Martin or Nick with that,
which I’d actually written with #Twitterblades in mind in the wake of our
Wembley defeat against Martin’s Huddersfield Town (Simon’s footballing circles
are far loftier), so with people whose shared experiences are more clearly
defined than ‘running’. Nevertheless, on a day when all over Britain shoes were
dug out of cupboards following Mo Farah’s 10,000m Olympic gold,
my inspiration came from three fellas whose achievements I can relate to a
teeny weeny bit better… yes, I might have run 5.6km more than Mo yesterday
evening, but it did take me 70’ longer! I truly hope that the likes of Farah,
Sheffield’s very own (lest the world forgets!) Jessica Ennis and all our other medallists
go on to inspire future generations. But, once dreams of Olympic glory are
realistically beyond you or behind you, it’s your peers who inspire you, whom
you believe when they tell you that “hills are your friends”. So thanks, guys –
I hope I can give a little back when you embark on your runs. Hey, I’m a novice
here: no marathons on my CV. I don’t even have a CV! All I have is a
registration to a 10k in a month and a half’s time, and some hope of one in a
month’s time if Mrs S agrees to drive me down to Cheddar
Gorge*. But I’m working on it… not to follow in Mo’s footsteps, but to
follow in yours and in the millions of folk like you who enjoy their running and sharing
their experiences… we’ll leave Mo be and happily settle for that.

*ooops… did I really admit that on the worldwide
web? no no no, of course there will be no races before Sheffield!

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About Me

Made in Sheffield, exported worldwide. Grew up near Genoa, Italy; returned to Sheffield for Uni (with some time in Nice thrown in for good measure) before falling South and then stumbling West to London, Slough and now North Somerset. Any further West and I'm going to get awfully wet. The 176m separating me from Sheffield generally shrink when I'm online.